Happiness Quotes

A mind always employed is always happy. This is the true secret, the grand recipe, for felicity.
Thomas Jefferson

If you observe a really happy man you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing Double Dahlias in his garden.
W Beran Wolfe

Happiness…she loves to see men at work. She loves sweat, weariness, self sacrifice. She will be found not in palaces but lurking in cornfields and factories; and hovering over littered desks; she crowns the unconscious head of the busy child.
David Grayson

Now and then a wearied king, or a tormented slave, found out where the true kingdoms of the world were, and possessed himself in a furrow or two of garden ground, of truly infinite dominion.
John Ruskin

Yes, there is a nirvana; it is in leading your sheep to a green pasture, and in putting your child to sleep, and in writing the last line of your poem.
Kahlil Gibran

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
George Bernard Shaw

Man’s real life is happy, chiefly because he is ever expecting that it soon will be so.
Edgar Allan Poe

Unquestionably, it is possible to do without happiness; it is done involuntarily by nineteen-twentieths of mankind.
John Stuart Mill

When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.
Helen Keller

Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.
Helen Keller

A man should always consider how much he has more than he wants, and how much more unhappy he might be than he really is.
Joseph Addison

If a man has important work, and enough leisure and income to enable him to do it properly, he is in possession of as much happiness as is good for any of the children of Adam.
R H Tawney

The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness.
William Saroyan

Existence is a strange bargain. Life owes us little; we ow it everything. The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose.
William Cowper

If thou workest at that which is before thee, following right reason seriously, vigorously, calmly, without allowing anything else to distract thee, but keeping thy divine part pure, as if thou shouldst be bound to give it back immediately; if thou holdest to this, expecting nothing, fearing nothing, but satisfied with thy present activity according to Nautre, and with heroic truth in every word and sound which thou utterest, thou wilt live happy. And there is no man who is able to prevent this.
Marcus Aurelius

We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about.
Charles Kingsley

One thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve.
Albert Schweitzer

It has never been given to a man to attain at once his happiness and his salvation.
Charles Peguy

Happiness is the light on the water. The water is cold and dark and deep.
William Maxwell

There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.
Robert Louis Stevenson

Happiness: a good bank account, a good cook and a good digestion
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
George Santayana

Happiness is the interval between periods of unhappiness.
Don Marquis

The will of man is his happiness.
Friedrich von Schiller

There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.
Epictetus

The secret of happiness is not in doing what one likes, but in liking what one has to do.
James M Barrie

True happiness is of a retired nature and an enemy to pomp and noise; it arises, in the first place, from the enjoyment of one’s self; and in the next, from the friendship and conversation of a few select companions.
Joseph Addison

My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I’m happy. I can’t figure it out. What am I doing right?
Charles M Schulz

Happiness to a dog is what lies on the other side of a door.
Charleton Ogburn Jr

I believe in the possibility of happiness, if one cultivates intuition and outlives the grosser passions, including optimism.
George Santayana

At rare moments in history, by a series of accidents never to be repeated, arise flower societies in which the cult of happiness is paramount, hedonistic, mindless, intent upon the glorious physical instant.
Colm MacInnes

Man is that he might have joy.
Joseph Smith

The formula for complete happiness is to be very busy with the unimportant.
A Edward Newton

Happiness is essentially a state of going somewhere, wholeheartedly, one-directionally, without regret or reservation.
William H Sheldon

Happiness: That’s nothing more than health and a poor memory.
Albert Schweitzer

Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
George Santayana

Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.
Robert Frost

It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.
Agnes Repplier

Happiness depends, as Nature shows,
Less on exterior things than most suppose.
William Cowper

Happiness is a small and unworthy goal for something as big and fancy as a whole lifetime, and should be taken in small doses.
Russell Baker